SCALE-UP STUDY OF HOLLOW FIBER MEMBRANE MODULES FOR GAS SEPARATION USING CFD

The purification of natural gas is necessary to comply with the levels required by environmental agencies and for commercialization. There are several technologies for gas separation, and membrane separation is one of them. Since membrane operation bench data is quite scarce, scale-up and performance assessment challenge the separation process. CFD numerical simulations can thus be used to overcome such limitations. This work uses CFD to evaluate a membrane module scale-up, where the fiber region is modeled as a porous media. With the study it was possible to evaluate the flow in modules of 2-in, 8-in and 12-in, using an extrapolation for the 12-in. module inputs. In addition, with a constant source term it was possible to observe the concentration profile of the species throughout the module.